


Making Do

by Valmouth



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Established Relationship, M/M, Not Happy, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 15:04:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7272910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are good days and bad days. Days when they go out and they are seen in public and it’s all about gently brushing against each other. When it goes wrong, they will pick up the pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making Do

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own no rights to these two characters or to the creative universe they are derived from. I mean no offence by posting this and make no money from it.

It is impossible to make this a normal relationship.

They’ve waited far too long and everything is too intense. There are too many conditions and too many angles, too many obstacles to make any of this smooth sailing.

And they don’t talk.

Well, they do. They do because they can make it light and blunt, just say it and put it out there and then move on. Don’t discuss it, don’t examine it, no need to reassure anyone because it’s no big deal. Nothing to worry about. Nod and reach for the glass instead; that will do just fine, thanks.

So it’s no surprise that everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket.

Lewis is retiring in a year. Hathaway is an inspector. They’ve lost seven years to loneliness and stress and they move slowly now. There is never an end in sight and they both have their own work with no more long days together and long nights alone in the office.

There is also Will and Scarlett and Zelinski, along with Val and Morse and Monkford. There is guilt and pain and exhaustion that runs the gamut from emotional to physical. But that’s okay. It’s easier to deal with ‘I am tired’ than ‘I don’t know if I can’.

‘I don’t know if I can do this, be this, say this, think this, feel this.’

Laura Hobson would have been easier.

Hathaway knows this. It sits there unspoken at the back of his throat- ‘why didn’t you make it work with Dr. Hobson? Why come back to this? To me?’

And Robbie, because Robbie is never asked, can never answer that. He is friends with Laura. He talks to her. He smiles at her. They spend time together.

Hathaway doesn’t see himself as a jealous person but he is a fatalistic one. So he accepts that it’s only a matter of time. Robbie will leave- either for death or someone else. He is prepared for it.

And he can handle it when it’s a woman. He’s not really gay anyway. _They’re_ not really gay. Robbie isn’t gay and wasn’t gay and he tells Hathaway that he is the exception. No one else comes close. No one else could make him feel this. No other man will do it for him.

Robbie isn’t Hathaway’s first time. Not by a long shot. Not since he was maybe six, maybe seven. Not since he was taken into the library for the first time and shown the books. Shown other things.

What is due the Family.

No harm done. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t cry. Don’t look like that, James. Be grateful, James. His Lordship is looking after us, James. It’s a good school. It’s a good chance. Noblesse oblige.

It’s a scholarship.

Who is your father? What does he do? Will you come home with me? Can I kiss you? Did I tell you I was gay? Will you still like me? Will God still love me?

Hathaway is sick of the questions, sick of the orders, sick of pulling dead bodies out of the Cherwell.

And he doesn’t want the rest either. There should be no bloody poetry. No Housman, no Shakespeare, no Shelley. No drop of comfort in the whole dark, dank world of stuffy rooms with pictures of dead people and the criminals who killed them.

He doesn’t want to end up like Robbie.

But he wants Robbie.

What he wants is to curl up beside someone who will put an arm around him and not expect anything in return.

Lewis doesn’t expect. He feels he can’t.

He is tired. Just tired. And at the end of the day he’s lonely. He wants company. He wants sex but it’s so difficult and so foreign and he doesn’t actually care all that much for it. Never did. He was never home long enough.

Not with dead bodies in the Thames and Morse in the pub and all those reports to write.

‘Lew-is!’ and ‘coffee can be instant but death is instanteous’. Constant correction. ‘Are you a member’. ‘Do you belong’. ‘That will be all, Inspector.’

It is all. It is all and everything and he’s just found something that makes him happy but James pulls away when he touches him and there are limits to the number of times they can mention it without falling apart.

‘Are you alright? Is this okay? Is this too much?’

‘No, fine. I’m fine. It’s good.’

And Lewis won’t ask because it’s not his business and James will lie.

James will always lie.

It breaks them every time and every time the pieces are shattered a little finer, a little more jagged. They lose more. They hurt more. They cut more. But James will still do it. James always lies. By omission as much as misdirection.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You’re not listening’.

Lewis has always listened but Hathaway has never said and after a while Lewis stopped asking. What else is he to do? What else will Hathaway understand?

There are good days and bad days. Days when they go out and they are seen in public and it’s all about gently brushing against each other. No holding hands. No public displays of affection. But the looks, the little smiles, the way Robbie will move closer, sit closer, lean forward.

Public is alright. In public no one cares. They have an excuse. There is wine and beer and relaxation all around them in people who are alive and laughing and half drunk and in love.

When it goes wrong, they will pick up the pieces. They will explain why and how and when and who. And maybe someone will care enough to listen to them but most of the time the world just moves on. That’s how it goes.

They finish their jobs cleaning up other people’s messes and they go home and sit in the silence, tense and exhausted and trying to remember when there was something else to talk about besides the evils men do.

They will mention other things- things to be done, things they want- and that’s okay but it’s all rather disparate. Lewis wants Australia and sun and Hathaway pulls a face and says Australia has more varieties of poisonous spiders and snakes than anywhere else in the world. And Lewis will remember the bronzed young bodies on the beach and his wife’s grave in Oxford and his grandson in Manchester, who he thinks of every day but only sees every third month or so.

And there will be the phone call at dead of night, for either one and once for both, and they will groan and roll over, fumble for the phone and mutter curses when it’s cold and dark and everything is tangled and too warm under the covers.

They are insomniacs and there is little to do and somewhere along the way they decide to learn how to play cards and Hathaway tries to teach Lewis how to play chess but he’s not a good teacher, so Lewis shelves it, violently, and it breaks his heart because Hathaway did try, did put himself out, and there are chess pieces on the floor and this isn’t what they do. This isn’t what _he_ does.

Except that it seems he does it now.

So he picks them up. And while he’s on his knees, he reaches out but Hathaway moves away. It’s not the right time or place and Hathaway’s spotted a copy of ‘Paradise Lost’ on the bookshelf that Lewis put up especially for him and it’s too apt.

He remembers another copy, with engravings, open on the desk in the library and he was sitting on His lap and being shown the pictures while that hand was...

He sets the glass gently on the table because the urge to throw things left him after his departure from the seminary. That broke him. His last thread of comfort- gone. Rejected. Who rejected who he can’t say. There was blame on both sides.

But there is always this- that one rejects the other. That is what he has had. And Robbie is the first person to see him as he is and to stand him. Not reject him. Not yet.

It will happen but not yet.

In the meantime Robbie will walk through that door, and he will lie down beside him, and he will curl an arm around him and there will be no more expectations tonight, so James can sleep easy and relax into the warmth.

Anything else will wait until tomorrow. When they will start again, painfully and scarred and jagged and damaged. And they will try to get through another day on the knowledge that this is not a normal relationship, but it’s the closest they’ll get.


End file.
